DEFORESTATION AROUND THE WORLD - India Environment Portal

Deforestation and Waodani Lands in Ecuador:
Mapping and Demarcation Amidst Shaky Politics
territory (Stocks & Espín 2010), and is intended by the communities to serve as a tool for
negotiating a co-management agreement with the National Park for the areas utilized by the
communities, as well as for joining the Socio Bosque program. Lacking a title, the comanagement
agreement is a pre-requisite for Socio Bosque. The northern boundary
recognized by the communities is the Tiputini river, a boundary agreed with neighboring
Kichwa communities, though both Waodani and Kichwa venture across the boundary. The
recognition of the Yasuní park boundaries is also conditional on whether or not individuals
perceive that the park and Ministry of Environment are providing benefits. Guiyedo is also
the first community mapping exercise to include locations where signs of the Tagaeri-
Taromenane uncontacted groups have been found by the Waodani.
Withal, the mapping work with communities has identified the hunting turfs probably
associated with the first Nanicabo settlements in each of the areas. These turfs (loosely called
‘community territories’) are well-known by community elders and each contains areas
identified with at least some hunting restrictions. In a situation of “shaky politics” at the
level of the ethnic group, the turfs or territories reassure communities that their own
management will be respected. Additionally demarcation at the level of the titled territory
assures local communities that their land claims are taken seriously by the central
authorities and that they share a common border with other Nanicabo communities. The
ambiguity with regard to their neighbors of other ethnicities is somewhat resolved by the
series of inter-community border agreements. In terms of strategy, the training of a technical
team fielded by the central organization, NAWE, has proved to be successful, both in terms
of getting the work done competently in association with professionals contracted by
NAWE and in terms of community perceptions of added value to NAWE itself. The
community conservation areas, now firmly geo-referenced, are the basis for agreements
with the Pre-REDD+ program, Sociobosque, and will undoubtedly play a significant role in
later REDD+ programs. Certainly it cannot be argued that these lands are not under
pressure from deforestation by Kichwas and colonists entering Waodani territory. The
efforts of NAWE and the communities to develop and implement local boundary and
territory monitoring programs will continue to be critical in protecting them.
5. Conclusions
The central issue in this chapter has been an attempt to avoid deforestation in one of the
world’s most productive and critically threatened habitats through consolidating the hold of
indigenous people on the land and by working with an indigenous organization with a
tenuous hold on legitimacy and a limited mandate from communities in order to improve
resource management and conservation. This is a challenge that most serious
conservationists encounter at some time in their career if they work around forest frontiers.
There is no easy recipe for success or guarantee that the forest will not disappear in a
determined number of years, but our experience is that the probability of encountering a
relatively intact forest in, say, 50 years is greatest if indigenous people are in control of the
outcome in areas they have historically inhabited, and greater still if they still maintain
language and customs connected to their historic past. The work IMIL has done with the
Waodani so far has, arguably, increased both the definition of the land controlled by them in
general and specifically by community – land that includes large areas of no-commercialhunting
zones – and their ability to relate to a central ethnic organization that can be trusted
to provide valuable assistance in the defense of land.
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